No Respect

No Respect

The Jeopardy game is over, and Watson, the supercomputer built and pro­grammed by IBM, won hands down. But, maddog tackles an item in the “Open Source Operating Systems” category.

The Jeopardy contest between IBM’s supercomputer, Watson, and two human Jeopardy champions fueled all sorts of speculation in the press as to whether computers would ever become as “smart” as humans or have “artificial intelligence.” Questions such as “Can it write literature?” were asked. Of course, that question was answered many years ago by the suggestion of putting an infinite number of monkeys in front of an infinite number of typewriters and waiting an infinitely long time while they wrote Hamlet. The answer is yes, but how long do you wait?